To:L. D. TROTSKY[1]

Dictated:Dictated by phonePublished:First published in 1965 inCollected Works, Fifth (Russian) Ed., Vol. 54.

      Printed from the text in Lydia Fotieva’s hand.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1976,

      Moscow,Volume 45,

      pages443b-444a.Translated:Yuri SdobnikovTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet ArchiveYou may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

ComradeTrotsky:

Ihave no doubt that the Mensheviks have now
intensified and will go on intensifying their most malicious
agitation. I think, therefore, that there is need to intensify
surveillance over and reprisals against them. I have already
spoken about this with Unschlicht, and request you to
find ten minutes or so for a conversation with him not by
telephone. As for the substance of the matter—I think Iagree with you. I now seem to be developing an urge to
write an article on topics close to those you have referred
to, but I shall nevertheless be hardly able to do this before
a fortnight is out. Therefore, it would be perhaps
extremely useful if you were to join open battle in the press right
away, naming this Menshevik, explaining the malicious
whiteguard character of his speech, and issuing an
impressive call to the Party to pull itself together. The term “state
capitalism” is, in my opinion (and I have repeatedly
argued with Bukharin about it), the only theoretically
correct and necessary one to make inert Communists realise
that the new policy is going forward in earnest. But, of
course, such malicious helpmates of the whiteguards, as
all Mensheviks are, can pretend that they do not understand
that state capitalism in a state with proletarian power
can exist only as limited in time and sphere of extension,
and conditions of its application, mode of supervision over
it,
etc.[2]

[1]Thisis in reply to L. D. Trotsky’s communication that the
youth conference, where he had given a report, was addressed
by the Menshevik Gurvich, who, referring to Lenin’s
pronouncements on state capitalism, asserted that the New Economic
Policy was a return to capitalism.

[2]Leninshed light on the question of state capitalism in the
political report of the R.C.P.(B.) Central Committee and in the
summing up speech on the report at the Eleventh Party Congress,
and also in an interview with aManchester Guardiancorrespondent, in a report at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, and
in his article “On Co-operation” (see present edition, Vol. 33,
pp. 279, 310–13, 402–04, 418–22, 472–73).